IP Carrier

How well can any telco do, in terms of internet access market share, when facing accomplished competitors with scale, skill and other business resources, including their own facilities?
Verizon’s experience with its FiOS service suggests the answer is “40 percent to 45 percent of the market,” even when fiber to the home is the access platform.  
"At the end of the second quarter of 2017, cable had a 64 percent market share versus 36 percent for telcos,” said Bruce Leichtman, Leichtman Research Group president and principal analyst.
Unless something breaks the current trend, telos could collectively become something of an afterthought in the access business, with market share as low as 28 percent by 2020, according to New Street Research. source: New Street Research
Stranding 60 percent of the deployed capital in FTTH access networks is one very good reason for some service providers to look at 5G fixed wireless. If the maximum share is range bound around 40 percent to 50 percent, t…

Even if one assumes there is relatively-constant pressure on retail communications service products, those price trends for fixed and mobile network services need deciphering.
Global prices, measured as a percentage of gross national per-capita income, have fallen at least since 2008, according to the International Telecommunications Union. But what requires explanation is higher prices, where they happen.
In the U.S. market, since at least 2009, prices have generally fallen for some products such as mobile service, mobile voice and texting.
Also, internet access prices have fallen about five percent since 2009. But prices for fixed network voice and content subscriptions have risen.


source: Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis
Even prices for internet access services, generally stronger in some quarters because consumers now are buying faster services that cost more than slower services, have dipped since 2009, with most of the drop happening in 2017.
source: Bureau of Labor Statistics
Th…

The commercial revenue drivers for 5G are not entirely clear, argues William Webb, Ofcom senior technologist. The “vision is flawed,” he argues.
On the other hand, in many markets, mobile operators will require speeds that “can compete with fiber services,” says Sam Barker, Juniper Research analyst. That means 5G is necessary, in the same way that optical fiber has been necessary to boost fixed network bandwidth (no matter how deep into the distribution network a service provider deploys it).
In that sense, it is not so useful to know that perhaps 1.4 billion 5G connections will be in service by 2025, up from one million in 2019, the anticipated first year of commercial launch, as Juniper Research now forecasts will be the case.
Many, perhaps most, of those connections likely will be accounts that already were buying 4G services. That is a familiar situation for many fixed network service providers moving from copper access to optical fiber: for nearly every account gain for “fiber-ba…

The communications business has become a funny, fuzzy world. We used to be able to clearly define “narrowband, wideband and broadband.” We used to clearly demarcate “private, in-building functions” from “public network “access” functions and assets” from “trunking” or distribution network assets, from wide area network functions and assets.

These days, as networks and apps are more virtualized, the old definitions do not always work. Consider the wide area networks.
These days, it likely is the case that more than a third of all traffic moving across wide area networks does so on a “private” (enterprise owned) network, and not over the “public WAN.” In some cases the private percentage can be as high as 70 percent.
“Now networks are being built by hyperscalers,” says Tim Stronge, TeleGeography VP. That is a historic change.
On Latin American routes, about 70 percent of total traffic now moves over private networks. In other words, only about 30 percent of undersea, long haul traffic act…